2023-02-16 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Thursday 🗓 Date: February 16, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 13 – Feb 19, 2023

The building was nondescript, flat and low among the rest of the office park, so small indeed that I nearly drove past it when I first arrived. It was not my first choice, to be clear. My peers had, after many years of interview preparation, resume wringing, and kissing the backsides of industry-connected professors, landed jobs of far more prestige, wrapped up in glass-wrapped skyscrapers and hand-delivered salary offers.

I was, to put it mildly, behind on the game. My college years focused on other goals far from these. I left high school a mere social caterpillar, longing for the days when I’d finish my transformation and stake a claim to the wide collegiate world I was entitled to. Perhaps finding my group was my calling, or perhaps the charms of some raven-haired young woman. But some entomologist must have miscategorized me all those years ago, for I never left my soft, lonesome form — I was no caterpillar, you see, but a worm.

And worms end up in the mud, here in the Walter-Dade Memorial Office Park. In all earnestness, I wasn’t actually sure what this job would require of me. In fact, I had no real conception of what this company did. The man on the phone had described the operation as little more than “inventory management” and “invoice processing,” but for what exactly he wouldn’t say, and in reality I simply couldn’t be bothered to push him on it.

The fact of the matter is that they payed far above my expectations for a company in such lowly quarters as these. Not that I’d be rubbing it in the noses of my skyscraper-dwelling college compatriots, but it was more than enough to live comfortably and perhaps set aside some money for whatever future I had in store.

With that as my sole comfort, I pulled into the front lot and found my way past the wilted lemon trees near the front entrance. The lobby was quiet, with seating for once might have been a security guard. The directory board had space for four floors of offices, but only the first was filled in if only because all the other letters on the board had fallen to the bottom.

“Ah, Jeremy,” I heard a voice from the opposite wall. It was the same voice on the phone, a cheerful, jovial tone. He was much like I had envisioned: a few inches taller than I, nearly bald, in long grey slacks and a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up above the elbow. He waved me in, his head darting around the corner. The hallway seemed to twist and turn far more times than one would expect for such a small building.

I couldn’t recall the man’s name, although he undoubtedly had told me on the phone. I went along, hoping for some name plate or sign to signal it once I got into the office. We turned a few more corners and opened up into a wide room — what must have been nearly the width of the entire building — with dull fluorescent lights and sixteen desks aligned in two columns.

Alright, at this point I need to finish the rest of these morning pages. But hey, pumping out 500 words in an hour isn’t too shabby! It feels good to start building out the world I was looking for, and I kinda like starting my morning just jumping into the story. I suppose one arbitrary thought is that if I want to hit a daily word count, I should always put the writing in a new document, but that means I either have to copy-and-paste into the old document or back into the new one, which is pretty fucking annoying. Ah, well.

Anyways, what else is on my mind. Work is kinda mind-numbing, and frankly I want no real part of it. I’m at the point where I simply don’t really care anymore, and I want little more than to phone it in for several hours a day. Especially since I’ve mostly managed to get this far without having to have the dreaded label of “DRI” for anything really, I’ve mostly just been hanging around and doing my thing. This is the sort of life I want, ideally — to be able to do the work I want to throughout the day, but not feel like I have a hard deadline. I want to lay low and have nobody really notice me, because there are simply other things I’d rather be working on, like writing, reading, or being in essentially any physical space that’s not my goddamn desk.

It was good to feel like Dan was also feeling this way when we talked yesterday. I still feel a bit bashful in the sense that I talk about writing a lot but don’t actually write very much. I’m changing that, starting today motherfucker, but it does feel like that’s where I really do want my plans to go: I want to write and publish something such that I feel like I can leave this corporate BS behind. In the meantime, hopefully the corporate BS gives me enough financial breathing room to feel like I can take my time and do the work I need to, but it’s a necessary evil and nothing more.

Anyways, I’m cutting this closer to 1000 words for the sole reason that writing pure fiction is way more mentally draining than this stream-of-consciousness BS I normally do, and I’ve spent like an hour and a half just getting this far, so I’m going to shower and hope that Whole Foods has some fried chicken waiting for me downstairs. May you be happy, safe, at ease, and free. Keep going, I see you. You’re not inferior to anyone. Good night, I love you, I’ll see you in the morning.